Category: faked emails

Burned by the offer of a special issue, a journal has retracted four papers after determining that the guest editors of the supplement were not legit. 

Neuroscience Letters, an Elsevier title, published the special issue — “Special Issue on Clinical and Imaging Assessment of Cognitive Dysfunction in Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders” — last summer, but it’s no longer on the journal’s website. The guest editors were listed as “Dr. Kalemaki Katerina Kalemaki, Dr. Hailong Li and Prof. Wiesława Grajkowska.”

This case is the third we’ve seen lately involving journals and publishers scorched by rogue guest editors. For an insider’s look at how such scams can run, check out our 2019 Q&A with Jamie Trapp, whose journal, Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine (formerly the Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine), fell victim to one not long ago. A preview:

We’re not accustomed to seeing journal article titles that end in exclamation points. But that’s what a title did earlier this month: “The Journal of Nanoparticle Research victim of an organized rogue editor network!”

The journal, a Springer Nature title, wrote the editors, “has been attacked in a new way by a sophisticated and organized network.” (It turns out not to be entirely new, but more on that in a moment.) As the editors explain:

The journal that allowed a bizarre article linking Covid-19 to 5G cell phone waves to “slip through the net” now blames rigged peer review for the fishy paper. 

The article, which earned raspberries from the likes of Elisabeth Bik (who called it potentially the “worst” paper of the year) and others, was retracted shortly after publication in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents. 

As we reported last month, the journal initially simply withdrew the article without explanation. But the publisher, Biolife, then provided us with a few less-than-satisfying excuses, such as: 

In Retraction Watch world, it’s like finding long-buried and forgotten treasure.

A now-defunct journal retracted nearly four dozen papers in a single sweep, citing questions about the integrity of the peer review process for the articles. 

The Open Automation and Control Systems Journal, formerly published by Bentham, released a list of 46 articles, which it published in 2015, by researchers from various institutions in China. Bentham dates the retractions to 2016. We learned about the case from a commenter to our recent post about a mysterious incident of plagiarism. 

According to Bentham: 

Talk about the publish-or-perish version of the circle of life.

A Springer Nature journal has retracted 33 articles — 29 from one special issue, and four from another — for a laundry list of publishing sins, from fake peer review to plagiarism to stealing unpublished manuscripts.

And an Elsevier journal has retracted ten papers recently for duplication — of ten of the Springer Nature journal’s papers.

A typical notice from the Springer Nature journal, Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP): 

Christos Damalas, an agriculture researcher at Democritus University of Thrace, has had more papers retracted from Elsevier journals for fake peer review reports, giving him a total of 15.

The three most recent retractions appear, as did some previously, in Science of the Total Environment. Damalas also had papers retracted from Chemosphere and Land Use Policy in October. We reported on nine of his retractions last October. (For background on how fake peer review works, read this.)

Here’s a typical notice (the repeated “request of” appears in the three from Science of the Total Environment):

The construction industry in New York City is notorious for rigged bids, but rigged peer review? 

A Queens, NY, building consultant has lost four papers for forging — or having had forged — the peer reviews of his manuscripts. (For background on how this works, read this.)

Faruque Hossain’s articles appeared in a variety of engineering-based Elsevier publications between 2017 and 2019. Hossain is listed as being the owner of an outfit called Green Globe Technology Inc., which is based in Flushing. 

Here’s the notice for “Green science: Decoding dark photon structure to produce clean energy,” which Energy Reports published in 2018: 

We’ve seen authors fake peer review by creating fake email addresses, and even companies that use photos of celebrities to lure unsuspecting authors. Now along comes a new scam, this one involving special issues of journals. In “Predatory publishing, hijacking of legitimate journals and impersonation of researchers via special issue announcements: a warning for editors and authors about a new scam,” Jamie Trapp, of Queensland University of Technology, describes what happened when scammers tried to snare the journal he edits — Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine. We asked Trapp to answer a few questions about the scheme.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently wrote about what you call “a new scam.” Tell us about this scam.